How real physics impacted time-travel game Quantum Break

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On the surface, Quantum Break may seem like just another action-heavy shooter, but it could prove to be one of the most ambitious games released this year. Developed by Remedy Entertainment, the studio behind Alan Wake and Max Payne, it blurs the line between video games and television with a time-travel storyline where player choice impacts not only the direction of the game, but also how episodes of a built-in live action show play out.

The game has also attracted Hollywood talent, with a cast including Shawn Ashmore as protagonist Jack Joyce, who finds himself with time-manipulation abilities in the wake of an accident that threatens to break time itself.

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WIRED speaks with Quantum Break director and writer Sam Lake on how real quantum physics influenced the game, wooing actors, and how a game studio steps into television production.

WIRED: Remedy worked with an actual quantum physicist to develop Quantum Break, correct? How involved was that collaboration?

Sam Lake: Yes, a brilliant guy, Syksy Räsänen. He's worked at CERN; these days he is teaching physics at Helsinki University. We were lucky enough to get him to come in as a consultant. We explained our ideas to him and he went through those ideas and tried to explain to us how modern physics sees that things work or would work, both on the classical physics and quantum physics sides. We had discussions and brainstorming sessions as well, around the Higgs field, the Higgs boson and how that relates to the idea of gravity; how, in theory, there could be a similar field and particle that is tied to time. From that we got our idea for chronofields and chronoparticles, which are based on the scientist in the story, called Meyer-Joyce fields and particles.

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For example, our time machine design did come from that. Räsänen was talking about rotating black holes and particles and gravity wells and how, at a certain point, if you move through space you're actually moving through time. And that's our time machine, essentially -- there is a core, there is a corridor. That was a nice thing to me, that our design is unique. I've never seen anything similar in time travel pop culture.

Jack's powers feel like an evolution of bullet time, as seen in Max Payne. From a gameplay perspective, how much of Quantum Break was wanting to evolve that concept?There certainly was an element there [but] we went into this from a direction of story and the idea of interactive narrative. We knew that we wanted to give the player a power to make choices and for me, that presented a challenge. To figure out a story genre that would be thematically tied to the idea of making choices that have consequences, and that led me to time travel. Because time travel stories usually are about that; you change things, explore causality.

So we had a story with a similar theme to what we wanted the player to be able to do. But we also very much tried to create a Remedy version of a big Hollywood blockbuster, so action and spectacle were big parts of it. By itself, having time travel in the story doesn't give you action. So we took a step back and decided to make time a big theme in general -- time breaking down and giving the player powers to affect time itself. That felt like the right direction because of Max Payne -- we knew that messing with time gives you a really impressive, cinematic experience.

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We were confident that we were on the right track, but at the same time we really wanted to create action gameplay that's more varied and deeper than any previous Remedy game and we knew that we needed multiple different elements in it which kind of gave us a different framework. In Max Payne, it's essentially all in Max's head. Time is not really slowing down, it's his perception of things. But here we wanted to create the superhero experience where all of these things are really happening with time.

Remedy is obviously a game studio, so how was it to transition into essentially TV production for Quantum Break's live action content?Challenging! There was a lot of learning on the way, in the most positive way. It's been fun to learn new things. I mean, luckily enough we had professionals with a lot of experience in that area with Lifeboat Productions on the show side. Microsoft's narrative team has been involved as well. We've been first and foremost focusing on the game side of it, but obviously the big picture needs to come together. My ambition on the way was, more than anything, to make it harder for ourselves! I wanted to bring these two sides closer, all the time, step by step. "Let's have more crossovers, let's make it tightly connected together", because that's something new, that's something no one has done before.

But the production models of iterative game development and the very set way of creating a TV show don't overlap. [With TV] you iterate on the screenplay level, but once that's done then it's building the sets, shooting, done, going to post-production. They are very different beasts. Trying to figure out along the way how to make these work together, our solution was to shoot the show as late in the process as possible. It was shot only a year ago. On the game side, we had built it far enough that we were confident that this is how it's going to be and this is how it looks, and then we could iterate on the screenplay level to connect things and get them locked.

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You've got an impressive cast -- X-Men's Shawn Ashmore, Game of Thrones' Aidan Gillen, Lord of the Rings' Dominic Monaghan. How did you attract them to an unusual project like this?The goal was to have a more well-known cast of established actors. We were approaching it in the same way as in movies and TV. We created the characters and bios and then started thinking about different actors -- you know, who we felt would fit the role. We gave this list to Lifeboat Productions, and being based in LA, they were huge on the TV side of things. These actors can be insanely booked for years and years, but Shawn in particular was someone we really, really wanted for this.

How was the actual experience of working with people not necessarily used to games as a medium?It felt like a good match and it's been great working with them. Shawn's a very dedicated professional, a really fun guy to work with. And we wanted to involve him. For us, making games is always a team effort so we kind of saw him as a member of the extended Remedy family in a way. We brought him in and explained our thinking on the story, especially starting out with Jack's character and who he is. And he was involved in the process of shaping the character; certain things in Jack he felt resonated in him and he could get a hold of, or he thought felt a bit loose, and we were workshopping it together with him.

Quantum Break is peppered with references to other time travel fiction. What's been the biggest influence on the game?On the time travel fiction side, classics like Back to the Future and Terminator. On the comic book level, very much the inspiration was the original X-Men: Days of Future Past. The comic book, but then suddenly it came to be a movie along the way. That has been very interesting as well, to see that time travel fiction has been coming up quite a bit in recent years. Looper and even Interstellar and X-Men movies; there's been quite a few time travel things coming around. Inception, as a movie, was certainly presenting a similar kind of thing, even if it wasn't actually about time, the fictional science and the visual spectacle on top of that felt like a great inspiration point. TV in general -- I'm a huge fan of today's TV, if you can even call it TV because now you're talking about things like Netflix -- but episodic content like that. On the level of pacing and storytelling in general, so many inspiring things are coming out on that side.